


Deals with Dragons

by TheDameintheRaininMaine



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Enchanted Forest, F/F, consensual princess stealing, you can probably guess what inspired this
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-31
Updated: 2017-08-17
Packaged: 2018-09-21 03:18:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 21,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9529436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheDameintheRaininMaine/pseuds/TheDameintheRaininMaine
Summary: Emma knew all the stories of the old days, of adventures and magic, and longed to have a story of her own.She did not expect it to begin with a dragon asking permission to kidnap her.





	1. Chapter 1

It was mostly pure luck that the day Lily was out hunting for a princess to kidnap, that Emma was sitting out in the meadow hoping for adventure. 

The warm summer day had begun with lessons (history, boring), sitting in with father when he went over the peace settlement documents with other kingdoms (boring), and a thankfully quickly ended dress fitting for the ball in a fortnight (Emma was fifteen, it wasn’t like she was going to grow much more). The sun was high in the sky by the time she had managed to steal away for a little time to herself out of doors. 

She had slipped off her shoes, and sat down in the warm grass idly picking a few flowers. She hadn’t always thought her life was boring, The first balls and state dinners had been exciting. When she was young, the village children had always welcomed her to play with them. And spending time in the woods with her mother and godmother, learning the old stories, the little histories that she wouldn’t learn in lessons had used to be her favorite thing in the world. 

But now, Emma had begun to tire of the aristocratic formalities. She was too old for courtyard games they said. And Snow had been so busy with the baby. And though Emma had begun to grow up, she was no better at her lessons than she had ever been. 

She longed for the days in her mother’s stories. The days of witches and battles, and magic. Ever since the death of her step-grandmother, the kingdom had been at peace. 

She was just contemplating the possibilities of going to get her horse from the stables and riding into the woods to visit her Godmother Red, when she saw the dragon in the corner of the field, lurking at the edge of the woods.

Emma had heard the stories, and seen the drawings. This dragon...didn’t particularly look like them. It was smaller than the drawings, it’s scales purple tinged black. And rather than ferocious, it mostly just looked sleepy. 

She didn’t realize that she had stood up and walked over until she was only a few feet from the beast. It’s eyes were shut, and was resting it’s head on the ground, as though paralyzed by the heat of the day. 

When she got so close she would see the smoke drifting softly from it’s nostrils, it opened one eye, and looked at her. Emma so so startled she stumbled. 

And from all the stories of dragons she had heard, she didn’t expect it to speak. 

Much less for its first word to be “oh!”

Completely bewildered, Emma asked “You can talk?”

The dragon blinked its other eye, before opening them both. 

“....Yes”

“But you’re...a dragon? Are they supposed to talk?”

“I look like a girl sometimes”. 

“When?”

“When I want to”. 

And with that, the beast disappeared in a puff of smoke. It left behind a girl about Emma’s age, with dark hair wearing a purple dress, who sits cross-legged on the ground. 

“I’m Lily”. 

Emma is briefly speechless. 

When she finally regains her wits, she asks. 

“So, why are you here?”

Lily flops onto her back. 

“My mom kicked me out. Said I’m useless”. 

“What did you do?”

“Nearly a caused a fire when she was trying to teach me to make a proper speech stealing potion. She traded the recipe from a sea witch”

“So she kicked you out?”

“She said to come back when I was living up to my legacy.”

From the look on her face, Emma wonders if she even wants to do that. 

“Is she always like that?”

“I mean, she does spend a ton of time trying to teach me. She wants me to be just like her. But I’m not, and I don’t think I can be”. 

“That’s rough”. 

Emma plucks a flower and idly toys with it’s petals. This is a bizarre situation, but the warm summer sun is making her feel more open to the strangeness. 

“I mean, I know I’m not good at all of this princess-y stuff. I’m not going at making people listen to me, or remembering all the rules of etiquette, or what treaties we’ve made with what people. But I’ve never doubted that my parents love me. I just wish I was from the days when a princess was constantly having to avoid monsters and evil stepparents. My mom was a wanted bandit when she was my age. We haven’t really had much need for a warrior princess in a while. ”

Lily stretches out and rolls over on her back. She hadn’t really known what she was going to do when Maleficent made her leave her dark and foreboding castle in the early morning sun. 

“I just wish I could make her proud of me, instead of constantly comparing me to her”. 

The two girls are silent for a few moments, when Lily turns and looks at Emma. 

“You said you were the princess right?”

“Yes”. It’s weird. Emma’s used to people recognizing her. She had never really traveled past the village without mom and dad, so she had never had the protection of anonymity. 

“Could I...kidnap you?”

Emma’s flummoxed. “I….don’t know how to respond to that.”

Lily sits up straight, and looks straight up at her. 

“I’m serious. My mom kidnapped and cursed two princesses in another kingdom. Dragons used to do it all the time. And being a damsel? There’s not much more princess-y than that.”

“You’re not gonna eat me right?”

Lily laughs. “No. There’s a cave in the mountains north of me mom used to use. It’s perfect! Long road straight up, lava caves, a hidden lake. Have you ever been to the mountains?”

It was true, Emma hadn’t. 

“My mom and dad will be scared…”

She trails off. Her parents had faced evil. Had had worse adventures than this and lived to tell the tale. They had raised her strong. And besides, Lily seemed nice. She didn’t think she would actually hurt her. And maybe rescuing her would give one of the knights some glory. 

“How do you want to do it?”

“It’s the strawberry moon tonight? Do enough people in your village still go out to see it that they’d see a dragon flying by the castle?”

Emma nods. She’d been considering climbing out her window to see it herself. The full moon, the biggest of the year. One of the warmest nights of the summer too, with the strawberries in full bloom. It’s was one of the nights that lovers would sneak out to the forest to make firefly lanterns and be alone for a while. 

“Walk back with me to the castle, and show me which tower is yours”. 

It’s not far. They can see the whole palace from the top of the nearest hill. Her tower is the southernmost one, close enough to the ground for it to be relatively easy to climb out of. Which she only did on occasion. 

Lily whispers, “I’ll come back around midnight. If you want to take anything, be ready.” 

Emma looks at her warily again. “You’re mom’s not going to be part of this is she?”

“I doubt it” Lily says, turning to make her way back into the dark forest. “She hasn’t left her ravine in years.”

And with that, Lily makes it to the trees, transforms back into her lizard form, and flies away, wings barely visible over the tree line. 

The night is warm indeed, the moon huge. A perfect night indeed. 

Emma had paced a bit, wondering if this was such a good idea. Her night clothes were simple, woven pants and a shirt which left her arms bare and would allow her to run or ride. She had one of her mother’s journals wrapped in a sack, along her good boots, a cloak and a couple of other items she thought she might need. 

She had thought about leaving her parents a letter, but didn’t know what to say. She didn’t want them to worry, but was she ever going to have an opportunity like this again?

Lily popped up outside her open window right on schedule. She was in human form again, and actually knocked. 

“Are you ready?”

Emma nods, sticking her bag onto her back and climbing over her windowsill to stand next to Lily on the ledge. 

“Climb on my back, and hold on tight. I don’t fly too fast, but I’ve never had a rider before. “

The puff of smoke comes, and Lily suddenly takes up a lot more space, nearly pushing Emma off. Her scaled face turns to her, eyes somehow playful still. 

Riding a dragon was nothing like riding a horse it turned out. Her scales were cool under her touch. Her whole neck moving, twisting, totally in control. 

“Hold on” Lily whispers again, before spreading her wings, letting out a burst of fire into the night sky, and taking off into the stars.


	2. Chapter 2

The mountains are about two days ride north of the palace. Slowly the forest thickens, then as the landscape ascends, twisting and bending up and around, it gives way to stark, sharp rock. 

Riding on Lily, they reach the mountains before sunrise, much faster than a horse could. 

Emma eyes the walking path that they’re above. 

“Do people actually come up here? It looks really dangerous”. 

“Not really,” Lily replies, “That’s probably why mom used to use it. She taught me to fly up here, said all the pointy rocks would give me incentive not to fall”. 

They’re over a deep gorge with several rocks rising to points that look as though they could easily skewer a human.

“At least one of these mountains used to be a volcano. That’s where all the weird rocks came from. We’re below the snow line too, so there’s no real reason for people to come around here. The roads all fork and avoid it through the rest of the kingdom”. 

“Is this where she kept the other princesses she kidnapped?”

“No” Lily says, starting her descent onto one of the ledges protruding from the slope. “She cursed their kingdoms too. She liked to wreck a lot of terror on their families. One of them burned all of the spindles and spinning wheels in the land in fear of her power”. 

She sounds almost bitter. 

“I actually don’t know a lot about what she did when she was young. I know about King Stefan and Briar Rose and their daughter Aurora, but she never spoke of her life before. Anyway, we’re here now.”

The rock ledge juts out where they land wide enough that a horse could easily come through. It looks almost cut, sliced out of the mountainside. The entrance to the cave is tiny, barely taller than Emma, small enough that a full grown adult could not enter while standing up. There’s a torch hanging on the inside of the wall, that Emma grabs and has Lily light before she transforms back. 

Lily leads her into the cavern, which opens up after a few dozen feet. It’s dark except for the torch until the path widens drastically, and a bit of natural light comes in through the top. 

When Emma gets a good look at the inside, all she can say is “Wow...this is a lair?”

Cut out of the stone are staircases leading in multiple different directions. The center is full of chests of varying sizes marked with stamps and hinges of gold. Crystal emerged from some parts of the rock in patterns, and the little light that filtered through caught through these, refracting into patterns all over. 

“I’m not sure what this all started as. It’s been unused for a while, we barely even came in here when I was doing flying lessons up here.”

She picks the staircase closest, the only one to head downward. 

“That lava pits and through here, I’ll cook us breakfast”. 

The lava pits are hot and glowing, and the size of a small pond. There’s a pit dug into the ground covered by a flat rock. Lily removes it and pulls out a loaf of bread. 

“How is that still good?” Emma says. 

“Magic,” Lily replies, “Might want to be careful touching stuff, I don’t know for sure what’s enchanted here and what’s not”. 

Lily sticks pieces of the bread with metal sticks, and they hold them over the open lava pits until they’re nice and toasty, and then smear them with jam. Emma hadn’t realized how hungry she was, it’s one of the best tasting things she’s ever eaten. 

When they’re done, Emma yawns. 

“Oh thank god, I thought it was just me. Mom sometimes makes me stay up all night, but I haven’t done it in a while”. 

She leads her further up, to one of the highest rooms in the cavern. 

“Sorry about the dust”. 

The room is carved out of the stone, but has a lamp, and a bed laid with blankets. 

“Can we look through everything else here later today?” Emma asks. This place reminds her of some of the rooms in the palace back home, full of books and antiques and other things that haven’t been touched in years. At home she would sometimes spend hours exploring these rooms, in search of their mysteries. 

“Sure” Lily says, “It’ll probably be a few days until your parents send anyone to try and rescue you, and like I said, I don’t really have much idea of what’s in here. I’ll probably sleep outside in front if you need me”. 

Emma lays back, she truly hadn’t realized how tired she was either. The excitement, riding all night, making a new...friend, it all had added up to her being exhausted. 

When she wakes back up the sun is high in the sky shining through the cavern skylights. There’s a trunk at the end of the bed, containing a number of simple linen dresses. Emma pulls off her night clothes, and switches it for one. It’s a bit large, but fits. She pulls on the boots she was glad to have the forethought to bring. The stone of the cave is starting to hurt her feet. 

She finds Lily in the next cavern over pouring over a bunch of enormous spellbooks. 

“Sorry if I woke you, there’s all kinds of stuff in here”. 

“I’m fine...what time is it anyway?”

“Almost noon, you didn’t sleep long,” Lily says, tossing the book aside and pulling down a scroll. 

Emma picks up the book and flips it open. The pages are yellowed with age, hand written in fancy script. The illustrations are vivid, detailed, almost like the anatomy manual of the castle healer that Emma had once peaked at. 

“Are you looking for something particular?”

“Mom was always hands on about teaching me magic. Throw me into the fire so to speak, like it would make it stick more. She wasn’t much for theory. I thought maybe if I looked through these books, something would make it easier. But these might as well be in a different language. Some of them are.”

The next book she tosses aside is written in pictorial symbols, that Emma feels like she’s seen before, but can’t make heads or tails of.

The first shelf in the cavern is full of more books and scrolls, but the next one is a lower shelf, littered with dusty bottles and vials full of liquids of every color. 

“I wouldn’t touch those. Potions are a big thing for mom, that shelf probably has all sorts of nasty stuff.” 

Emma squints at the bottle on the end, which has a shakily written label. 

“‘For the prevention of the bites of the moon-winged butterfly of the South Woods’...that’s, oddly specific”. 

“You can make a potion that does about anything if you know what you need and how to get it.”

Behind the shelf of elixirs is a painting. It’s a scene Emma does recognize, a huge black and purple dragon reigning over a whole kingdom encased by wild vines. 

“Wow.” Emma says, staring, “I should have realized when you said last night...that your mother was Maleficent”. 

“Her reputation precedes her. She would be pleased”. 

Lily’s voice is dispassionate. 

Along one wall, there’s a low, broad chest that Lily pulls open. It’s full of jewels, and gold coins. 

“What’s that for, some kind of knight bait?”

“Well traditionally, the knight that slays the dragon gets it’s treasure. Dragons have a thing for shiny things, mom’s got chests like this all over the place back at the Forbidden Fortress, she never uses them for anything really.”

Emma picks up a red stone, marvels at the light running through it. 

“I’ve been meaning to ask, about the whole dragon thing. You seem to spend a lot of time as a human. Do most dragons do that?”. 

Lily shrugs. 

“I don’t really know, all I have to go by is mom and me. Mom spends more time as a dragon than I do. When I’m human, it feels like it’s what I’m supposed to be, but when I’m a dragon, I feel the same. I only know about other dragons from the stories.”

She touches the necklace Emma just noticed, a small crescent moon.

“Don’t you have a father?” Emma asks. 

“I suppose I must, I mean I have to have come from somewhere. But I don’t know anything about him, mom won’t tell me, no matter how many times I ask.”

The hand that was on her necklace, she lowers, clenched into a fist. Emma finds herself reaching out to touch her shoulder, but Lily jerks away. 

“I think I need some air, come on, there’s something else you might want to see”. 

Lily leads her back up, then onto the staircase that leads furthest up. It’s longer than the other have been. When it opens up again, Emma is shocked to see a huge underground lake. 

She runs up, kneeling and sticking in a hand. The water is warm, almost like bathwater. She looks up, and sunlight streams in from the largest opening in the cave that she’s seen so far. She pulls off her boots and sticks in her feet too. Honestly, she’s been feeling the need for a bath. 

“I didn’t know there were any hot springs this far north. All the others are swarming with people year round.” 

“As far as I know, this is the only one” Lily replies, staring up at the sky. 

“I’ll be back in a little bit, I’ll bring dinner.” is the last thing she says before transforming, and flying out into the opening in the cave. 

Emma strips off the unfamiliar clothes, and slips into the water. 

Then she stares up at the sky, at where Lily had been a moment before.


	3. Chapter 3

The second day of exploration leads the two to finding all sorts of interesting stuff among Maleficent’s treasure. 

There’s a necklace that Emma notices. When she asks about it, Lily says, 

“It makes the wearer invisible.”

“I guess that makes sense. I might not have noticed it, but it’s sort of…vibrating”

Lily squints at it closer, “I don’t see anything like that”

Emma pulls it over her neck. 

“Does it work?”

Lily nods, and then she takes it off, and tucks it in the pocket of her dress. 

“This might be handy.”

Further back into the cavern are more paintings, mostly of Maleficent and her cursing of the two sleeping beauties. 

“Why does she keep these?” Emma wonders, “These stories all end with her being defeated”. 

“You would never accuse mom of being humble. And I don’t think she considers those defeats final”. 

“What exactly was her problem with that family? I’ve met Aurora a few times, she knew my mom somehow. She and her husband seemed nice”. 

Lily shrugs. “I could never tell you why mom did anything she did really. It was probably some slight that she took extra offense to.”

“It doesn’t sound like she would be pleasant to live with” Emma says, sympathetically. She’s beginning to wonder how Lily’s mother really treated her. 

“She could be very strict sure, but she always fed me and taught me everything she knew, so I could be a great powerful sorceress like she was in her prime”.

“Do you want to be like her though? I mean, she is best known for doing evil.”

“I...don’t know. I’m not really sure what else I could do, I don’t have any other skills, and she’s my only family”. 

“Don’t you have any friends?”

“I’ve barely ever left the Fortress on my own. Honestly, I was kind of happy when mom kicked me out, just because of that. You’re actually one of the first people my age I’ve ever talked to”. 

“Wow,” Emma says, “I mean, I guess I’ve always been sort of sheltered, but I’ve always known other kids. Children of our servants, the kids in the village, the other students my tutors had.”

She reaches out to touch Lily’s shoulder. 

“I’ve never had a close friend though. You’re my first”. 

“I met you three days ago, then I kidnapped you”. 

“I said you could though, so this is really more like an adventure”. 

What she said was mostly true, she had always had a number of friends, but never ones she could truly call close. Being a princess always put up a barrier of some kind. But there’s a funny feeling in her chest, that she was suspecting wasn’t exactly friendship. She dismissed it as empathy, for another girl who seemed more isolated than her. 

Over the next few days, they find a handful of unused memory stones, a huge cauldron, and a flame that would not go out even when Emma pitched it in the spring. 

They find a small glass bowl, built over the miniature of a city. 

When Emma looks closer, she swears she can see people moving within it. 

There’s a seashell they find that Emma says vibrates the same way the necklace had. 

Lily looks at her sideways. 

“Have you ever had any kind of magical teaching?”

“No”. 

“Because both this and the necklace are ordinary objects that have been enchanted. Most of this stuff was either created by magic or is innately magic. If you can pick out these things....”

Emma turns over the shell. It looks completely ordinary. 

“What’s it been enchanted to do?”

“It’s supposed to capture someone’s voice. I don’t know if it’s in use though.”

Emma holds it up to her ear. 

“Nope, just the ocean in here”. 

The only other object Emma sees the vibration on is a mirror in one of the far corners. 

“Oh,” Lily says, “That’s the Mirror of Souls. It’s old. Story is is that it was enchanted by a sorcerer king because he didn’t trust anyone in his life. If someone who looks into it has evil in her soul, their eyes will glow like fire.”

Emma steps in front of it, looking herself up and down.

“Any glowing eyes?”

Emma laughs, “No, I may not be the most pure of heart, but I don’t think I’ve ever done anything truly evil”. 

She looks over at Lily, who’s standing a good three feet from the mirror. 

“Are you...avoiding it?”

Lily stays silent. 

“Lily, you literally asked nicely to kidnap a princess. You’ve been a great host. You admit to yourself you’re not sure you’ll ever live up to the expectations of your self-professed evil mother. I really doubt you have evil in your soul”. 

Lily stays silent, and starts looking through a chest on the other side of the cavern. 

Emma turns the mirror back towards the cave wall, and lets it be.

Their having breakfast by the lava pit the morning of the fourth day in the cave, when Lily suddenly jerks and cups her hand to her ear. 

“Someone’s on the mountain, I’ll go find out who.”

“Wait,” Emma says, jumping up. She removes the necklace that she had stashed before in her dress pocket. “I want to see too, I knew this would come in handy”. 

When Lily transforms at the mouth of the cave, Emma slips on the necklace and climbs onto her shoulder. 

“What do you see? Emma says eagerly, squinting down the path. 

“There’s a knight about half a mile down”, Lily whispers. “He’s wearing a helmet covered in feathers”. 

“Those are the ceremonial Black Knight helmets. No one wears them for regular stuff, there are plainer ones now….wait, is his horse a roan with a braided mane?”

Lily pause a moment before answering “Yes”. 

Emma groans. “Edgar, of course it would be him”. 

“You know him”. 

“He’s one of the newest black knights. Son of a nobleman.” 

“What’s he like?”

 

“Totally full of himself. Thinks he’s the best at everything, no respect for anyone who would try to teach him. Dad said he would never make it if he didn’t stop being so arrogant, but his father is influential. He would make sure he was the first to do something that would potentially make him famous and beloved”. 

“What should we do about him?”

By this time, Edgar’s reached the path right below the cave, and has pulled his sword. 

 

“Great beast! Face me in combat and release the Princess!”

Emma rolls her eyes, and whispers, 

“Do the big scary dragon thing. I’ve got an idea.”

Climbing down she continues. 

“Once I get his sword away, pick him up off his horse”. 

With the invisibility necklace on, Emma can get beside Edgar’s horse without notice. 

“Foolish knight!” Lily booms, louder than Emma’s ever heard. Dragon vocal cords must be tremendous. “You dare challenge me!”

She roars, and lets out a breath of fire 

When she does, Emma jabs two fingers violently under the breastplate of Edgar’s armor, right into his side. 

The shock causes his to loosen his grip enough that Emma quickly slips it out of his hand, picks it up, and pitches it off the side of the mountain. 

Lily picks Edgar up off his mount in one of her clawed hands, and Emma slaps the animal’s side, sending it running, quickly, back down the mountain, spooked. 

She climbs back up on Lily’s shoulder, who whispers, 

“What should I do with him?”

Edgar’s struggling in her grip, but still shouting as though he has a chance. 

“Is there a swamp anywhere near here?”

“Yes, just a few miles to the west”. 

“Let’s leave him there”

The swamp is darkened by vegetation, and full of deep ponds and marshes. It only takes a few minutes to fly there and leave Edgar, sputtering angrily in the mud, before returning to the cave. 

When they get back, Lily transforms back and Emma removes the necklace. 

Almost in unison, they both burst out laughing. 

“Oh that was amazing, he’ll probably spend the whole hike complaining about the mud on his boots.”

Lily’s grinning, more genuinely that Emma has ever seen. Impulsively, Emma reaches out and hugs her quickly before pulling back. 

“That’s the most fun I’ve had in years, I could get really used to being your princess”.


	4. Chapter 4

The next few weeks follow in much the same manner. 

Emma starts examining some of the potions in the treasure cavern. She reasons that she was lucky getting Edgar’s sword away from him and might be better with some magical ammo. 

She hits pay dirt a few days later. 

The label on the bottle of yellow liquid says “to cause two minutes of irresistible sneezing to the applicant”. 

Always have to be safe though. 

“Lily can you come here for a second”

Well it definitely works, though Lily’s cross for the rest of the day. 

The knights come like clockwork, every two days. Some of them Emma recognizes, some she doesn’t. None of them are as arrogant as Edgar, so they drop them areas nicer than the swamp. 

The third one almost sounds scared when he challenges them. 

“I almost feel bad for him” Emma says, when they get back from ditching him in a ditch. 

“Lots of people join the Royal Guard now, but our kingdom’s been at peace since before I was born, I don’t think any of them would have expected to fight a dragon in their lifetime”.

“I’ve spent so long in mom’s fortress being trained, I don’t think it ever really occurred to me that I would ever actually fight a knight”. 

Emma looks at her. 

“No offense, but we’ve been beat these guys pretty easily. You’re humongous, solidly scaled and you breathe fire. If we weren’t committed to not killing them, you could have barbecued them all. How do you defeat a dragon?”. 

Lily gestures around them. 

“Magic mostly. Dragons are vulnerable to all kinds of it, and most kings in the old days have wizards or sorcerer’s among their advisors. Also”, 

She taps her temple over one ear. 

“Area behind the ear is super sensitive, when I’m a dragon the only easy to get to gap in my scales are behind my ear flaps”. 

“I’ll keep that mind” Emma says sweetly. Right before she reaches out and flicks Lily behind the ear. 

“Look at it this way, they’ve clearly heard of you now! You’ve got a reputation your mom might hear about”, 

The fourth knight is young and handsome, quoting his necessary lines with bravado. Emma is struck by a sudden thought after they stick him in the swamp. 

“Oh god, I hope whichever knight eventually rescues me doesn’t think I’m going to marry him”. 

Lily looks at her suddenly. 

“Would your parents actually make you?”

“Well...no. Mom and dad married for love, but the whole knight-rescuing-the-princess thing...It’s like a classic, that’s how it’s supposed to be...I don’t know if I could get out of it if people knew”. 

Emma’s flushed with embarrassment. This is something that should have occurred to her when she agreed. But to be honest, she hadn’t even thought much about how this was going to end. She was going to have to go home sometime. Even though right now, thinking about leaving makes her chest hurt. 

“What are we going to do?” Lily asks quietly. 

Emma shakes her head. “Umm...there’s a couple of the guards, they’ve been with us since before I was born, they’re old enough to be my grandfather, with wives and families...maybe I could let one of them take me home, Or-or, maybe I could pretend to escape. Princesses have done that before, my mom has pulled more than a few daring runs for freedom in her own time.”

“Want me to rough you up a little?” Lily asks, eyes bright like she’s trying to be helpful..”

“I should probably just douse you with the sneezing potion then make a break for it. That actually might give me some realistic burns.” 

This idea hangs over Emma for the rest of the time at the cave. It’s strange to admit, but she’s happy here. Happier than she can remember being. True, she misses her parents, misses her baby brother, and her bed. She doesn’t want to leave. She wants to catalog every magical thing in this cavern, wants to find out how it all works. And she doesn’t want to leave Lily. She feels a tug deep in her gut when she realizes that once she goes back to the castle and Lily goes back to Maleficent, the chances of them ever seeing each other again are going to plummet. 

She does her best not to let it show. 

Two and a half weeks later on an off day when they expect no knights, Emma sits up at the side of the spring. She’d found a box of bars of soap in one room, and has decided to take the time to wash the few clothes she’s had. It’s warm enough that day that the thin shift she’s put on to do the wash doesn’t make her chilled. 

Lily’s stretched out alongside the bank, lolling in the sun. She’s not in her dragon form, but the way her stomach sticks out she almost looks the same as she did that day in the meadow. 

She turns over and plucks one of the flowers that grow on the banks. She’d called them mountain lilies, they could grow just about anywhere. They had supposedly been why her mother named her Lily. 

Lily’s staring at one of the flowers when she says, 

“Tell me how your parents met?”

Emma cocks her head. 

“It’s so strange to have to tell the story, everyone in the kingdom knows it”. 

Lily sits up and pulls herself to the edge of the water beside Emma. 

“I’m sheltered remember?”

Emma puts down the soap and pushes the bundle of laundry into the water to rinse. 

“After her stepmother tried to have her killed, my mother ran into the woods and lived by herself as a bandit. She tried to rob the coach my father was riding in with his fiance, and he chased her into the woods. Things kind of spiraled from there, there were spells and enchanted apples, and dwarves, it’s a very long story”. 

“Your father already had a fiance?” 

“It was an arranged marriage that neither of them wanted, Aunt Abigail’s lovely. But Dad always maintained that as soon as he met Mom, he knew.”

“They said it was love at first sight?”

“That’s the story, but I’m not sure I believe it. Tons of stuff happened to them then. Mom went from being a princess to a queen, dad went from being a shepherd to a king. Huge things changed in their lives. Going through all of that together...I can imagine it forging something powerful, but definitely not at first sight.”

Lily’s looking at her intently. There’s feeling gnawing in Emma’s chest.

“I guess you don’t know about how your parents met do you?”

Lily shakes her head, but doesn’t break her gaze. Emma’s suddenly wishing she could see herself, because she can’t tell what her face might be betraying.

“Mom never talked about them, I only know that he existed. She’s never talked about love in a positive sense, only as something that would ruin her plans”. 

They’re closer than they were before, and Emma’s not sure which of them has moved. 

“I guess it’s never something I thought would be a part of my life”. 

After a moment, Emma turns to pluck one of the lilies growing, and slips it behind Lily’s ear, softly brushing the spot she’d earlier said was sensitive. The other girl shivers. 

“Don’t sell yourself short. Life’s an adventure”. 

The first time their lips touch, it’s so soft it could be an accident, a gentle gust of wind. Emma pulls back just enough to bump Lily’s nose with her own. Lily’s eyes are still shut, Then her lips quirk into a smile. Then Emma laughs, and Lily laughs too. The next thing she knows, she’s holding Lily’s face between her hands and they’re kissing more fiercely than before. 

Emma’s head is spinning, and her heart feels like it’s bursting straight out of her chest. She isn’t sure she could ever find a way to leave the exact place she is right now. 

At least until she hears the squack, and the thunderclap. 

“What on earth?”

Emma looks up into the opening in the cave. The sky has suddenly turned gray and rain has begun to pour down on them. 

Both girls jump up on the bank, Emma grabbing her laundry, and move back onto the bank under rock cover. 

“I don’t understand, it was perfectly clear this morning” Lily says. 

Emma catches another hint of the other sound she had heard. 

“Wait is that-” 

The bird flaps down through the opening, landing right in front of her on the ground. It has the royal colors marking its talons, and a note tied to its neck.  
Emma jumps. 

“Mom’s been training carrier pigeons. She was working with an enchantress from a nearby village so they could seek out a recipient’s voice, and find them no matter where they were, I didn’t think she’d had any success”. 

Emma takes the note and unrolls it, confused and unsure as to what she’s going to find. 

“Emma, 

I don’t know where you are, but I can only hope you’re safe. Your father and I were so frightened of what had happened to you, we would have never seen her coming. We don’t know what we have done to anger Maleficent, but her magic will soon overrun our kingdom. Seek shelter, and stay safe. Your dad and I love you, never forget that”. 

By the time she finishes reading, Emma’s crying and Lily’s hands are covering her mouth in shock. 

“I...I didn’t know, I swear to God”. 

Emma balls her hands up at her sides, and sniffs. 

“This is all my fault. “

She stops crying, and steels herself. 

“Let’s go. We’ll take anything that looks magically useful. We’ll leave the mountains, find another kingdom, figure out a plan.” 

She turns and grabs Lily by her shoulders. 

“You said you didn’t want to be like your mother Lily, here’s your chance. Help me, help me save my family. Help me stop her”. 

Lily reaches and takes both of Emma’s hands in hers. 

“I will. That’s a promise”.


	5. Chapter 5

The clouds are thick and the rain pounding as far as the eye can see when they leave the caves. 

A blanket touched with waterproofing potion covers Emma, shielding her from the worst of it. The necklace of invisibility wraps around one of her ankles and one of Lily’s shoulders, just barely. She has to keep an eye to keep it from breaking or falling off. But they don’t know what they’re flying into. 

She’s changed, back into her boots and sleep pants and tunic. They’re thin, and would be conspicuous if they were in a regular town. Her sack is stuffed with as many of the useful magical potions they’d discovered over the past few weeks, precariously wrapped in cloth. 

“Where are we?” She asks, the rain too heavy for her to see much. 

“We just passed the edge of your mother’s kingdom” Lily replies, dipping below the clouds to get a better look .

The rain continues here, and the further past the line it gets, the more disturbing the landscape gets. 

After one town, the vines start. Thick, twisting vines longer than seem possible, wrapping around buildings and trees. 

“I know what this is” Lily whispers. “The vines are what Mother uses to cover an area that she’s placed under one of her sleeping curses. “

“We’re barely over the border” Emma says quietly. 

“I’ve never heard of her casting one this large before” Lily waits a moment before adding, “We should try and find where the line of the spell ends”. 

“Can-can we fly over the palace first? I just, I need to make sure it’s still there”, Emma says meekly. 

They reach the palace before night, though with the storm it’s hard to tell. 

It’s silent. Eerily so to Emma, who is used to the whole place being swarmed with people. The halls, the yard, the grand entrance behind the gate, all totally still. The flags in front, raised for the summer festivals, are battering themselves in the wind. 

And when Lily flies in closer, she sees the bodies, all lying on the ground, Even though she knows the curse only causes sleep, Emma would swear they were all dead. 

“Do you want to-”

“Do you remember where my window is?” Emma asks, sounding faraway.   
“Yeah”

“I just need to get something.”

With Lily hovering at her window, with much difficulty Emma manages to get off her back and into the window without slipping the necklace off until she was inside. It takes her less than a minute to find what she’s looking for- her mother’s dagger, gifted to her at the age of fourteen. 

“I should have brought this the first time.” Getting back on Lily with the necklace is harder than getting off was, causing Emma to nearly fall a few times, her stomach lurching in fear., “You never know when you might need a knife.”

“Quickly” Lily whispers to her, “It’s getting late”. 

Before they leave, Emma hears a bone chilling bird call. Lily stiffens underneath her. 

“Let’s go” she says, “I would know that call anywhere, Diablo, my mother’s raven. He’s completely loyal to her, she raised him from a chick. He won’t be able to see us, but if he catches our scent he could hunt us down easy.”

She bristles underneath Emma again. 

“Beast used to drop rocks on my head and I would swear he would laugh”. 

“Let’s hurry then, find where the spell ends and take shelter.”

The time leaving the kingdom feels like it ought be forever, Emma’s eyes are drooping by the time there’s a break in the rain and no more vines in sight. They land on the grass, and Emma slides of Lily’s back, tucking the necklace into her pocket. 

They’re in a forest, though Emma’s not sure which one. Geography was never her strong suit. 

“We should make camp” Lily says, lighting a stick into a torch before transforming back into a human. 

Emma shivers, her clothes having gotten soaked through despite the blanket. She walks close to Lily, desperate for the warmth of the fire. 

They find a spot on a low hill, where the trees are low enough to fasten the blanket to make a makeshift tent. Lily uses the torch to light a small campfire and the two girls huddle under the blanket. 

“I’m sorry” Lily says softly. Emma looks at her quizzically. “This is my fault, I know this is. Mom’s clever, she must have known I would try something, and when she heard, she used it as an opportunity to do this. This is huge, it would have taken planning, lots of it.”

“You didn’t know” Emma says, warming her hands. “And since you don’t exactly seem the most gifted at magic, I doubt there was anything you could do to stop her”. 

The two are silent for a time while the embers dance in the dark. 

“Should we use the necklace tonight?” Lily asks, laying down on one side, clearly as exhausted as Emma is. 

“It’s probably a good idea,” Emma says, pulling the chain from her pocket and lays down facing Lily. She slips it around one of her wrists, and then reaches and loops the other end around Lily’s. 

“What about the fire? Or the tent?”

“The blanket was only invisible before because I was holding it so tight” Emma says. “Now it’s just a blanket”. 

“What if someone finds us?”

“They’ll find the fire and blanket. It will look abandoned”. Emma’s voice has gone breathy with exhaustion, and she lets out a yawn. 

“Sleep now” she says, “We’ll think in the morning”. 

And before Lily can say anything else, Emma’s out. 

Lily is awake for just long enough to wonder how exactly it was that she found herself in this situation, sleeping on the ground next to the princess who she had been kissing earlier the very same day, on the run from the only family she had ever known. 

It was enough to make a girl lose her scales to sheer confusion. 

The next morning comes quickly. Lily wakes first, and after sliding off the necklace, and then extinguishing the fire, notices a strange noise up the hill. 

After climbing high enough to locate the source of the noise, she wakes Emma with a yell of. 

“We’ve got a problem”. 

Emma jolts herself up, standing and climbing up beside Lily. The other girl points across the top of the hill, where a harsh gray rainstorm and curling vines are are visible across the horizon. 

“That’s...much closer than it was last night isn’t it?” Emma says with disbelief. 

Lily nods, and reaches out to take her hand, Emma wrapping their fingers through the loops of the necklace rendering them unseen. 

“Have she ever made one that’s spread before?” Emma asks. 

Lily quietly shakes her head. 

“Let’s move then, figure out where we are.”

Lily moves to transform, but Emma tugs on her hand. 

“No, stay human today. We might have to talk to people, dragon you is both eye catching and threatening. Today we’ll just be two girls out for a walk in the woods, scared of what’s coming and not knowing what to do.”

“That at least is true” Lily says. Emma feels her shaking, and squeezes her hand tighter, hoping she’s not shaking too.


	6. Chapter 6

They travel for two weeks across the neighboring kingdom. It’s a small, quiet place ruled by a King Emma can’t remember meeting, and mostly known for its exports of sheep and wool. 

It takes them two days to reach the first town. Most the animals in the forest seem to have fled, seemingly aware of Maleficent’s spell before the people. At night, Lily takes the necklace and flies above the forest. The spell is spreading, more slowly, thankfully, than the two girls are traveling. 

After two days of eating nothing but berries and nuts, the sight is a welcome one. The excitement is tarnished a bit when Emma realizes they have no money for food or lodging, and nothing to trade which would not arouse suspicion. 

It turns out not to be an issue. 

They are hardly the only ones fleeing from the spell it seems. 

The one night they spend in town is spent huddled in the main room of the inn with three or four dozen others displaced by the vines. There must be a hundred of them, crowded into one room, eating thin stew and hard bread. Many of the others seem worse off than them, but despite this, someone still manages to gather up some more appropriate clothes for the two (Emma’s pants are in tatters, and even Lily’s plain dress has seen better days not dragged through the woods). 

After dinner, they sit in the corner under scratchy blankets drinking weak warm cider and talking with the others. 

“Never seen anything like it” one of the old shepherdesses says. 

“I lived in King Stefan’s kingdom before I was wed” the innkeeper interjects, “My mother was under Briar Rose’s hundred year curse. Everyone was out like a light, no notice. If this one is like that...I can’t imagine where it will end”. 

“Why is she doing this?” Emma asks, feeling her eyes water. She isn’t sure whether she’s just a far better actress than she ever would have thought or if the bizarre nature of hearing about something happening to her second hand is getting to her after these few unbelievably intense weeks, “What kind of goal could she possible have?”

“She’s an evil beast, who could know of her motives”, an old man says. 

Emma can feel Lily trembling beside her, and reaches to hold her hand under the blanket, to steady her. 

“Don’t trouble yourself lass,” another man’s voice says, “As far as magic goes eternal sleep isn’t a terrible curse to withstand, there are far worse which could be coming our way”. 

Somehow his words don’t comfort Emma at all. 

They press themselves into a corner at night, as far from the others as they can get. 

Emma has her eyes squeezed shut, begging for sleep to come, when Lily whispers to her, 

“These people can see right through me can’t they?”

“What are you talking about?

“You heard that man earlier. An evil beast. If that’s what my mother is, what else could I be? And all these people...I’ve never even lived among normal people, how could I expect to act like them…”

Emma throws one arm over Lily’s prone body, and clasps her clenched fist in her hand. 

“That’s nonsense. We both know there’s more to you than who you come from. And as for acting normal? You can walk and talk, and your ‘evil beast’ mother taught you manners. Being ‘normal’ beyond that is overrated”. 

Lily is still stiff beneath her, so Emma presses herself closer to her until they both fall asleep. 

They leave with the same group of refugees the next day, chasing anything that is always from the slowly impending cloud. They split off the day after, when some of the others start to pry about who they are and where they’re from. 

The rest of the two weeks fall into a pattern. Walk, forage, sleep. There’s a couple taverns, a hay loft, one more inn like the first, full of refugees. 

Every time they run into other people, there are more stories. 

One man claims to have seen Maleficent fly down from the mountains, swollen with power, before the spell was cast. The others heckle him, reminding him of his fondness for drink.

“It is strange” Lily says later that night, “We didn’t hear or see her coming from the cave, even though the Forbidden Fortress is further north, she would have had to pass us. We didn’t hear or see anything”. 

“We weren’t really paying the closest of attention” Emma replies. She feels her heart sink a bit. Thinking of the time in the cave still makes her feel guilty. 

One night in the second week, they’re attacked by bandits at night. 

In the second week, they’d mostly stopped using the invisibility necklace, as the waves of other refugees made it seem unnecessary. It’s tucked deep in Emma’s pack the whole time. 

That night, Emma is woken roughly by a foot roughly pushing her into the ground. 

She lets out a noise of panic, and feels something cold press into her neck. Before she can even think of reaching for Snow White’s dagger, the night is broken by a roar, and the sudden sharp smell of sulfur and blood. The pressure is gone from her back. 

The next sound she hears is a retch. 

There was two of them, the bandits, both with swords. Thin, weedy men who had clearly been living off the backs of the travelers through this wood. Neither of them will be robbing anyone else anytime soon. 

Emma holds Lily’s hair back until she’s done. 

“Let’s go” Emma says quietly when Lily finally ceases, “Someone might have heard.”

They walk that night in silence under the moon. 

“I’ve never killed anyone before, never even come close” Lily says, face straining. 

“It’s not like I have either,” Emma replies, holding Lily’s arm.

“I heard them come up, and I think I heard one draw their sword...when I heard you yell, I didn’t even think, I just reacted. I just needed them to get away from you”. 

“Hey, “ Emma stops, and faces her. “They had a sword to my neck. If you hadn’t done what you did, they would have almost certainly hurt us. You stopped that.” 

Lily nods, her eyes shut. As though trying to convince herself. 

“But if it matters? I am so glad you don’t like killing people. I can’t imagine I would like it either”. 

At the end of the second week, they reach the end of the kingdom, and the beginning of the next. A simple wooden sign is all that marks. 

“Should we just keep heading east?” Emma asks. 

“We’ll get to the sea eventually, it’s as good a plan as any. We’ll keep trying to get information, we can’t let the spell catch up with us.” 

“We were going to make a plan at some point weren’t we right?”

Lily glances back over her shoulder at the area where the clouds were gathering. 

“I guess we’ll have time. No matter what.” 

The forest they enter feels...different...somehow. It takes a mile or so for Emma to put her finger on it. 

She sticks out her arm to stop Lily. 

“Listen” she says. 

After a moment 

“What am I hearing?”

“Birds.” Emma says, excitedly. “I haven’t heard any birds or seen animals of any kind since the spell started.”

At just that minute, a blue bird flies into the meadow they’re standing in. 

“See!” Emma says, following it. “Wherever it’s going, this has to be a good omen. 

Soon after, the bird leads them to a beautiful glade, the water cool and clear, and in the middle, a tiny house. 

Before either of them can even think of knocking on the door, a zoom of color coming from out of the trees, and knocks Lily on the ground. 

“Hey!” Emma yells, moving to help her up, when two more come from other directions. 

She reaches for her bag, thinking if she could just get to one of the potions that might help her escape. Before she can, the door of the cottage opens and a woman with copper colored hair emerges, running towards the group. 

“Flora! You three, stop it right now!”. 

Emma’s on her back by this point. The woman approaches her and helps her up. 

Emma stands, and tries to get a good look at her. 

“Emma, what are you doing out here?” Aurora asks, as the other three fairies flank her on either side.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FYI, I'm leaning pretty heavily on the Disney canon version of Sleeping Beauty here, while making up my own backstory- I hope you can bear with me!

The next thing Emma hears is one of the fairies, behind her, saying, 

“Keep away from her, I’d know the aura of the beast anywhere!”

She twirls to where one of the three is aiming their wand at Lily, who is still on the ground, and starting to look a little angry. 

“No!” Emma shouts, running over, and pulling Lily to her feet, “Don’t touch her, I know who she is, and I know that you and others probably think you do too, but she has been nothing but kind to me, and I won’t have her hurt because of who her mother is”. 

She’s out of breath by the end.

It takes nearly an hour to explain the situation. Thankfully, it’s over tea. 

Aurora shakes her head. 

“As soon as word of the sleep spell came, I rushed here, to see what these three could do. There’s a barrier on us now, this whole forest and the areas around the palace. The spell won’t touch us, but there wasn’t much else we could do”. 

“And the spell won’t break the barrier, but there’s nothing we can do to stop it from spreading anywhere else. We have power, but it is limited to our wands. We could never dream up something like this”, Merryweather adds grimly. 

“I should send a message to the palace.” Aurora says, getting up, “That we should let in as many refugees from the surrounding areas as we can, while we can”. 

Emma’s met Aurora a few times in passing. She seems older than she ever has before, wiser somehow too. It makes sense, she supposes. So much of her life was shaped and molded by what Maleficent had done to her. 

“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” Emma says, her head slumped onto her chest, “How do you even break a curse this big?”

“Both my mother’s and mine were broken with True Love’s Kiss. My mother’s also had a time limit on it, but something tells me we can’t afford to wait a hundred years for this one.” 

Lily, who has been extremely quiet this whole time, finally speaks up. 

“There’s something else. We flew over the area when it happened. None of the vines are centralized, there’s no focal point. Something tells me that this spell wasn’t laid on a person, but on a place. Something intended to grow and spread, like an invasive weed. I don’t think True Love’s Kiss would work.”

Emma smiles to herself. Seems you did learn something from all the lessons she gave you, she thinks. 

“This is beyond our scope,” Merryweather says, “Maleficent is a creature of wild magic. She sought training from the Blue Fairy as a young woman, and was cast out when she refused to follow our code of morality, or to show remorse for the damage she caused.”

“Wild magic?” Lily asks, finally looking the fairy in the face. 

“The fae from the north east, Camelot and the islands it borders. The magic there is steeped in the land, and the beings that live there. The humans there are used to it, but it’s not like it is here.”

“She’s never spoken of where she came from”

“She’s been all over. Collecting whatever magical secrets she could learn or steal. Enchantresses, imps, anyone from the most ceremonial sorcerer to the lowliest kitchen witch was worth a visit to her. We guess that must be how she learned to turn into a dragon. “

“How else is there to break a curse?” Emma interjects.

“A spell this big would need to be bound. A scroll most likely,” Merryweather says, “Burning or otherwise destroying the scroll would undo the spell and all of it’s effects”. 

“But that wouldn’t do anything to Maleficent herself” Fauna adds. 

“Why did she even cast this spell? She has no known grudge against Emma’s family or the kingdom,” Lily asks. 

“I suspect that she may be seeking something. An object of some power or importance, that she doesn’t know exactly where. It could be something incredibly dangerous if she was willing to cover an entire land with this spell to find it,” Merryweather reasons. 

“If only we could-” Flora starts. 

“Let us discuss alone” Merryweather finishes. 

And then the three fairies zoom off outside to consult among themselves. 

After they’ve left, Aurora refills the tea cups, and places a hand on Emma’s shoulder. 

“How are you doing about all of this? I know your mother always wanted you to be able to take care of yourself…”

“It’s fine, “ Emma says, a bit sharply. “Let’s not mince words, my decision started all of this, even if it would have come to pass anyhow. I used to want to be a hero like in the old stories, the least I can do is live up to that dream”. 

Aurora looks at her, head tilted a bit. 

“If you say so”. 

“What do you think they’re talking about out there?” Lily asks, shifting in her chair uncomfortably. 

Aurora laughs, “Some plan probably. They’ve always got something up their sleeves. Fairies around here get hung up on the rules and morals and guidelines of using their magic, but they’ve always got something to help out a would be hero”. 

She then brings the two girls sandwiches and they wait until the fairies return from their discussion. 

“The only way to find out what Maleficent might be seeking would be return to where she came from”. 

Aurora jumps up, “You can’t be serious, the courts of the fae are incredibly dangerous. They’ve remained mostly out of our hair only because humans from the island kingdoms know their place”. 

Emma freezes. This is something she has heard of. The island kingdoms east of Camelot, where the forests intertwine with the world of the fae; the seelie and unseelie courts. A human wandering, could be gone for a hundred years in the span of a blink. Whole swaths of rules learned from toddlerhood. 

“There is no choice I’m afraid,” Merryweather says, downcast. “We cannot set foot in their land-”

“No being of civilized magic could,” Fauna butts in. 

“Regardless” Flora cuts back in, “If the two of you hope to stop this, then you must. You two are uniquely close to this situation, you have more means than anyone, and now you have the opportunity.” 

She keeps talking, and Emma wonder if anyone else hears Aurora mutter, “I hope you three know what you’re doing”. 

“We cannot accompany you, but we may at least provide you some kind of aid.” 

Fauna settles herself in front of Emma, shuts her eyes, and taps Emma’s forehead with her wand. 

“Child, you have a soul of some of the strongest faithfulness I have ever seen. Daughter, friend, princess, you have never wanted anything more than to be loyal to the people you love.”

She taps the wand again, and suddenly Emma feels very warm. 

“I give you the blessing of courage. May you carry it with you, throughout your travels.”

When she moves to do the same to Lily, her voice drops, and Emma wonders if any of the others can hear her. Aurora has been gracious, not even flinching away from accidentally touching her hand while giving Lily her tea earlier, but the glances from the other two fairies have not stopped. 

“The others laughed at me when I said Maleficent couldn’t be all bad. You are proof I was right. Despite your birth and upbringing, you have retained a pure heart. All you need is to believe in it.“

She taps her forehead. 

“I give you the blessing of honor, may you carry it the rest of your life”. 

When she leaves to return to the other fairies, Emma notices Lily has tears running down her face. 

Merryweather clears her throat. 

“We are preparing some enchantments which may help you with with the more practical side of where you are going. But it will take time”. 

“Which means you two have to stay here tonight, “ Aurora says firmly. She stands. 

“Come on, I’ll show you in”. 

Emma is dimly aware that it’s night time now, the forest around the cottage is dark. The lanterns in the bedroom are warmly lighting it up. 

When Aurora opens a trunk to pull out a couple of extra blankets, Emma comments. 

“This is your room isn’t it? This is where you grew up, here in this cottage”. 

She nods. 

“I grew up not knowing who I was. Flora, Fauna and Merryweather were all mothers to me. When I met Philip, I barely knew what a man was”. 

She turns and addresses both girls very closely. 

“I hope you understand what you’re getting yourselves into. “ 

She shuts her eyes tightly. 

“When I found out that the three of them had sent Philip into the thorns after me, knowing how dangerous it was, I was furious. It didn’t feel right, as happy as I was to eventually wake up, to send a good man after a girl he barely knew. For years afterwards I wondered how they could do it. I’ve come to realize that for all they’re magic, they are often incapable of doing much directly to fix a situation. It’s up to us. “

She places the stack of blankets on the end of the bed, and continues, in a much different tone of voice. 

“I wasn’t sure if you two wanted to share the bed, if not, don’t worry, the floor’s perfectly clean”. 

She dusts off her dress, and turns to leave. 

“I should go. The palace will be expecting me back tonight. I’ll be back in the morning to see you off”. 

When she leaves, her whole demeanor changes, rises, makes herself tall. She is suddenly the Queen, not Aurora the girl who lived her whole life in this forest. 

Emma turns to the bed. 

“I’m okay sharing if you are”. 

The two of them have spent the last weeks sleeping much more closely together than the bed allows. But the act still has an undercurrent to it. One that it is neither the appropriate time or the place to contemplate. So after Lily slides under the blankets, Emma puts out the lantern. 

When they lie beside each other in the dark, Emma asks. 

“Did your mother ever tell you anything, anything at all about where we’re going?”

Lily’s quiet, then says, “No. But it makes sense to me. She never did seem much like any of the fairies from around here. “

“So I guess we really are heading into the unknown then”. 

And then Emma falls asleep, Lily not soon after.


	8. Chapter 8

When the fairies promised to equip them, it turns out they were not kidding.

Emma leaves the necklace with them, and Flora disillusions them. As long as they were on land touched by sleep spell, they would not be noticed by man or beast. Their canteens will never empty, their blankets never tear.

“Here,” Merryweather says, tucking back Snow White’s dagger into a soft leather holster, “The metal of the blade will not break or dull”.

Aurora presents Lily with a wooden shield that she can barely carry until they help strap it to her back.

“This is the shield of virtue. It was given to Philip by these three when he ventured into Maleficent’s spell years ago. The sword of truth unfortunately, has been lost to the years, though it doesn’t seem to have done it’s job permanently anyway.”

The three wash and mend their clothes and enchant them with layers to keep them warm, as Fauna points out, autumn is upon them, and by the time they reach the isles of the keilt, winter may be as well.

This, had been their one caveat. Flora had said she had never managed to properly disillusion a horse, so Emma and Lily must proceed in their journey on foot.

The maps they can provide will be invaluable, but the journey will still be long and difficult, and Flora warns that once they reach the land of the fae her disguises will be useless. She warns them to take their time in the towns and villages on the isles, to learn the customs and rules.

And then they boot them out of the cottage and send them on their way.

The walk out of Aurora’s kingdom is peaceful. Emma relishes the sunshine, and the bird song and the small animals scurring around. When they reach the border, it all disappears.

The enchanted dagger makes cuts in the vines just big enough to pass through. And Emma’s surprised to find that they were not truly as thick as they seemed when they were fleeing.

“The vines are more of a mark than an obstacle. Mom never would expect anyone to walk onto land she had cursed, she just wanted everyone to know she had done it. What part of the country are we in?”

“Aunt Abigail and Uncle Frederick’s. I’ve been here a few times, but there’s not a lot to the land. No giant mountains, or impossibly fast rivers. There are a lot of dairy farms though.”

The flooding rains over the land have thinned, to occasional showers. The wind is still constant and bone chilling, and the clouds never cease.

When the day carries on, the subject of dinner comes up.

“The spell puts most of the land into a kind of stasis. Food should still be edible. And thanks to Flora, no one should notice what we take”.

They find a small cottage, and slip quietly through the door.

Emma finds bread on the counter and freshly made cheese still in its press. Lily finds the cellar and brings up some turnips and sausages. Emma slices them together and they have sandwiches.

“I don’t think I’m ever going to feel right just walking into these people’s houses and eating their food.” Emma says, licking the last bit of cheese off her fingers.

“This is one meal’s worth. There’s plenty of royals out there who think far less of taking from their subjects every day”.

Emma laughs.

“Joanna- she was my nanny when I was little- said my mother had a bit of a stuck up brat phase as a child that she’s super ashamed of. That’s why I went to school to learn to read and write in the village with the other children, the tutors only came when I was older and had to learn more than common children did. It’s why her and father always took me when they traveled, so I could meet the people we ruled. Dad was born a shepherd, so we never forgot it.”

The cottage has two small bedrooms. Children must live here, and Emma wonders why they aren’t here, felled by the curse. Were they playing in the woods? Doing chores? In the village? Where were they when they fell into a cursed sleep?

They’ve cleaned up and are preparing to leave the next morning when something occurs to Emma.

“Did your mother even mention any side effects of the sleep spells? I remember when I was younger, mom used to mention dreams she would have. Dreams of rooms full of fire that would come every night after dad woke her up, and that sometimes she would see other people there.”

Lily shakes her head.

“I’m not even sure if it’s the same spell. Big spells are really personal, really heavily linked to the user who casts it. We can’t say for sure if mom’s spell has anything in common with your queen’s.”

“What has she told you about it?”

“She always talked about the one’s on Aurora’s kingdom as revenge. Big showy revenge, kind of her thing I guess. But like I told the other fairies, I don’t think that’s what this is about.”

“What do you think is then?”

Lily chews her lip in thought, and doesn’t answer for some time.

“My guess? There’s something she’s looking for, and she doesn’t know where it is. The spell would let her turn every kingdom over and shake it without any resistance.”

More days pass, more sleeping in random cottages, barns, inns. Most of them aren’t empty. Though the vines wrap around buildings making them look as though they have been abandoned for years, the people inside look almost peaceful. It doesn’t make trying to sleep near them any more comfortable. They get used to floors and hay lofts.

They find people in all sorts of positions. Doing chores. Playing. Eating a meal. On one memorable occasion, they find a couple in bed (they both fled the room red faced). It really as though a regular day just stopped.

Honestly, getting to stroll through the country with Lily, showing her the towns and forests and little hidden places would be fun. It would be nice, to get to do something like this just because they could, so she could show her the world that she had never gotten to see, were it not done under the weight of the curse.

When they reach the edge where Aunt Abigail’s kingdom ends and theirs begins, Emma begs Lily to take a rest with her at the lake. The lake is less than a day from where her Godmother Red lived in the forest, and they used to come here in late summer, as a kind of retreat, during the height of the corn moon. They would have been come and gone this year, if this hadn’t have happened.

It’s true that she wants to rest, but there is a real motive.

“When we get to Camelot” she says, “We’re going to have to get ourselves across, you won’t be able to fly us, and there’s not going to be anyone awake to ferry us.”

She pulls down the wooden kayak from one of the racks at the shorehouse.

“And so, we see if I remember how to row”.

The answer is only sort of, but the day gives her a little more practice. The months before this have increased the strength of her arms, and the strength it takes to pull the oars is not near as much as she remembers.

She tries to teach Lily, but it turns out to be harder than she thought.

“I’m not used to having to be strong in my human form” she says, rubbing her arms after another loop around the lake.

“Is it strange?” Emma asks, taking back the oars, “Not being able to be a dragon at all?”

“It’s like...imagine you’re going to do something that you would usually use both hands for...only to find that one of them is tied behind your back. It’s like a reflex sometimes.”

But she manages to give her a rudimentary lesson on rowing, all the same.

When the gray sky starts to turn darker, they leave the lake and camp a little ways into the wood.

The next day, they pass Red’s cabin.

Emma realizes she must be staring when Lily asks, “Do you want to stop here too?”

She shakes her head. “I know she’s not home, sleeping or awake. Her grandmother died a few years back, and then she met a girl over the rainbow. She’s only in this world occasionally now”.

Emma glances in the garden beds behind the little house. What used to be lovingly tended tomato plants and sprawling strawberry patches are now alternatively overgrown and starved from the lack of sunlight.

“Everything planted in spring is going to die” Emma realizes, “Even if they're in statis, the growing and harvest seasons will be lost”.

“When the spell is lifted, it should all go back to normal. Aurora’s kingdom wasn’t damaged at all by either spell. Those year’s harvests were lost, but the land abides.”

“How long has it even been? I remember we left the night of the strawberry moon, but I’ve completely lost track”.

“The harvest moon was last night” Lily says, confidently.

Emma stares at her.

“Are you sure?”

Lily nods. “I can still see the moon and stars through the sky at night. I don’t know if my eyes are just more suited to it or what, but I can still use the sky to navigate and keep time”.

“The harvest moon...that means it’s autumn. I’ll be sixteen in two weeks. It’s been months since I’ve been home….”

It takes three more weeks on foot until they reach the end of the kingdom, and into the next before Camelot.

They should have reached Camelot before winter no problem. But as soon as they cross the northeast border, Emma develops a cough.

She hides it for days, as it gets worse. She can feel Lily’s eyes on her, but she ignores it.

Then the day comes when they have to cross a difficult river. The rope bridge is rickety, and Emma’s chest and throat burn with every step against the wind. The cough has gotten worse, and Emma has started to feel woozy that day. She steps hard on one of the last rungs and goes into the water.  
The world goes dark.

The next thing Emma knows, she’s woken up on the floor of a cave. She’s been stripped to the skin, and wrapped in every blanket they had. There’s a fire lit by her, and she looks and seems Lily sitting at the mouth of the cave. She starts to sit up, and can’t stifle a cough.

“Save your breath. We’re not leaving until you’re better. I can’t believe you let it get this bad”.

“I didn’t want to slow us down”. She notices that Lily’s staring out into the gray.

“What are you looking at?”

“I had to transform to pull you out of the water”.

That makes her shoot straight up.

“What?”

“Only for a few minutes. But I’ve been seeing mom’s minions in the sky since then. One of them saw me”.

“But as long as you stay human…”

“But now she knows I’m here. And I guess she cares”.

Lily shuts her eyes.

She’d transformed to rescue her, Emma realizes, knowing that she was the one being put in danger by it. She remembers Fauna’s words. Honor indeed.

When Lily opens her eyes again, they look wild. She turns, and runs to embrace Emma where she sits, pressing her face into her shoulder.

“Jesus you scared me Emma. If you’d...I’d have been alone again. More than I’ve been before”.

Her arms squeeze tight, and Emma lets her face rest, Lily’s hair tickling her nose. She breathes her in. There’s a warmth in her gut, different than the fire in her chest. Tonight, she can indulge it.


	9. Chapter 9

Emma’s illness takes the better part of a week to disappear, her cough receding and her fever fading. She bemoans the lost time. They still truly have no plan for once they reach the isles, and are unsure of what might be found. 

And it is true, that by the time they reach Camelot, it is deep in the coldest time of winter. There is no snow, and thanks to the fairy enchantments, they feel no chill, but it is unmistakable by the rise of the cold moon. 

Also, there’s a far more pressing concern. 

“What’s happened to this place?” Lily asks, when they walk down the city’s main street. 

Everything has been torn open. Doors are askew, bins over turned, shelved emptied and tossed. Nothing seems untouched. 

It hits Emma like a ton of bricks. 

“Someone was looking for something here”. 

Lily sucks in a breath. 

“Well...I guess she didn’t find it. The spell is still here, and she’s gone”. 

More concerning is when they reach the waterfront. The winter means that the water is far too strong to cross. 

“What do we do now?” Lily asks. 

“We wait. It will have to calm down sometime”. 

And so they wait.

The capital is the largest city Emma has ever been in. There’s houses of every size, inns and taverns and a whole bazaar of shops. Virtually every building is crawled over with vines. The city center is set up for a festival, probably something honoring the end of summer. The decorations have been torn asunder by the storms the spell brought. They change where they sleep every day or so. Emma still feeling guilty about taking other’s food. Even though some of the foods they find here are not things she has ever eaten. Camelot was a hub for trade, and it turns out Lily has a nose for spices. She prepares a sausage pie one night that nearly brings tears to Emma’s eyes. 

One night, Emma finds an antique lute in one inn. 

“Do you play at all?” Lily asks. 

“Not in the least” Emma replies, “But it’s vibrating like the stuff in your mom’s cave was, maybe it’s magic and can be played by anyone”. 

If this is true, apparently the magic isn’t strong enough to get passed Emma’s tone deaf ears. Lily laughing into the night rings far brighter than the clanging strings.

They ravens and crows and other birds circle the city. Maleficent’s presence is still here, even if she is not. 

Emma finds one of the large kayaks on the dock, and ties it. She checks it over for holes and dings. And when the water first starts to show some calm, she gets in and practices her rowing on the slack line, with Lily waiting on the shore. 

Truthfully, Emma spends as much time on the shore as she does, because she can faintly see the line where the spell ends in the sky. It’s the first flicker of sunlight she’s seen since they left Aurora’s forest. 

“Do we know if the spell will cross water?” Emma asks one night, when they’ve been in Camelot about two weeks. 

“It could I guess, but it won’t at first. And I doubt she would try to pass into her old realm. Fae magic is powerful in it’s own right, and the queen has a reputation for being vindictive.”

They sit there for a while. It’s late enough at night that Emma can see the glimmer of the stars on the horizon. It’s comfortable, strangely so. These whole weeks have been this way, calm, and happy. Looking at Lily now makes Emma feel warm, and comfortable. The silence between them right now is the same.

Which is why it surprises her when Lily breaks it. 

“Back at the cave….why did you kiss me?”

“Because I wanted to” Emma replies, not willing to hide anything from the night. 

Lily has her legs tucked up against her chest, and she’s not looking at Emma. 

“Why?”

There’s a long pause. Lily finally lifts her head and looks at her. Her eyes are wet and she’s looking at her like she did after pulling her out of the water.

“You haven’t done it again. Was it just some kind of impulse? Because if it was, please tell me now because I don’t think I can….”

“It wasn’t an impulse”, Emma says quite fiercely. “I haven’t done it again because it hasn’t seemed….appropriate”. 

She tucks herself into herself small like Lily was a minute ago. 

“I mean, my whole kingdom was cursed because of something that was my fault.”

Lily opens her mouth, but Emma cuts her off 

“Don’t. It was as much my fault as yours. But after that...thinking about myself, thinking about something that made me happy didn’t feel right...in fact it made me feel sick. “

It still does, a little bit, 

“But I’m just some dragon girl who you met by pure chance”

“Lily” Emma says quietly, reaching out to take her hand. “You’ve saved my life, twice now. You’ve been by my side through this whole thing. The plan was ours, and so is this journey. You’re not “just” anything. You’re incredible”. 

“What’s going to happen when this is all over?” Lily asks. “Will you just go back to being the princess, and I’ll go back to being the disappointing daughter”. 

“Would you even go back to your mother after this?”

“I...I don’t know”. 

“And how could she be disappointed in you, after this? She might not agree with what you’ve done, but she ought at least respect the guts it took!”

The quiet silence has returned, but Emma’s feeling bolder now. This curse has interrupted enough for her. 

The moon peeks out onto the horizon, beyond the edge of the spell. It’s full tonight again. 

“Since you brought it up, mind if I do it again?”

Emma smiles in a manner she hopes is saucy. And Lily actually smiles, and Emma feels her heart melt. 

They meet in the middle this time, and rather than the nerves Emma felt the first time, now she only feels contentment. 

Lily pulls her closer, and threads her fingers through her hair. Emma feels herself laugh against her mouth, and hopes once again, that this could be under an ordinary night sky. 

The water is calm enough the next morning, so they load up the kayak, and Emma paddles through the water past where the clouds end. 

The calm water is still pretty rough, and Emma’s arms burn quickly from the exertion.. It’s a larger body of water than the lake had been, and while seaworthy, the current was still rougher than she was used to. 

It’s all worth it when the edge of the sky breaks, and the winter sunshine hits her face again. 

It takes about a half an hour of rowing before they see the edge of land. It’s not much longer before they reach the coast. 

The shoreline isn’t sand, just just a strip of dirt. The sky is clear and sunny, but there’s still a dusting of snow on the ground. 

Emma feels like throwing herself down onto it. So she does. 

She’s a little surprised when Lily does the same.

Lying side by side on the snow-touched ground, they both start laughing. 

“Okay”, Emma says, taking a breath. “That’s one obstacle down”.


	10. Chapter 10

Emma has never been to Kelt before. The islands were technically under the rule of Camelot, but remained very sovereign and insular. Her and Lily are grateful for the extra time under disillusionment to get their bearings. 

The villages they encounter are all small, with some sheep and cattle, and very little in the way of merchants. Since the people here are awake, they return to foraging in the woods. Thankfully, there are a lot of woods. 

The snow that’s falling is light enough to not impede their travels, not even close to what the wind and rain had been. The midwinter lights are out, and the harvests brought in. Time has kept on here, even if it hadn’t at home. 

The rumblings that the two of them have gathered about the fairies here are already apparent. The women of the houses put out bowls of milk every night. Roads wind around areas rumoured to be dens. And they pass one family, weeping over a child, that they swear had been changed in the night. 

Lily’s been a bit restless. She wakes at night, shifting under Emma’s arms and waking her too, before rolling back and resettling. She says her skin itches here, which makes Emma think it might be a reaction to being close to the fairies that are her ancestors. 

One day, they cross into a new village with the festival poles up, and the barrels of cider smoking. 

“It must be the last evening of the year”, Emma whispers. 

It looks perfect, the light dusting of snow, all the lights still up, everyone gathered in the square. But the people in this town seem...different. 

Lily picks up on it too. 

“Why is everyone here so….tired?

“Maybe it’s been a hard winter?” Emma suggest uncertainly. This is unlikely, considering the snow is so light, and the festival tables seem well filled. 

They stay on the fringe of the group, sneaking roasted nuts and trying to listen. The poles are wrapped and light, the lights go up and then down, but they are no closer to the truth. 

Then in the darkest of night, the first door creeps open. 

The first out of the house is a well dressed young man. He is followed by a willowy girl of about eleven. One by one, all the young people of the town mindlessly march out of their houses and head towards the forest. 

 

“Should we follow them?” Emma asks. 

“I guess that’s how we find where this goes”. 

Stories have made their way back to the mainland. A prince, or a princess, or a gaggle of them, drawn into the forest by the power of the fairies, forced to dance all night, into exhaustion, 

The trees here are tall and thin, blocking out most of the light from the moon. Then the group reaches the break in the trees, when the light pours through. 

“Oh!” Emma exclaims, “We have these back home, but I thought the name ‘fairy ring’ was just to make it sound fancy”. 

One by one, the crowd steps through the ring of mushrooms on the forest floor. Emma and Lily are last, and, a little apprehensive, they clasp hands before stepping through. 

When they go through, Emma feels a gasp escape her throat, and Lily beside her physically quiver. 

The cold winter light has lifted, transforming into the gentle haze of a midsummer’s night. The green grass and trees seem to have been turned up a notch, almost too green to be real. The meadow they were in has widened. Tables line the edges, laden with plates heavy with every kind of delicacy imaginable, And floating through the air, are the faeries. Small people, of all ages, bearing delicate wings and murmuring in a language that almost sounds human. A few sit to the head of the clearing, playing their instruments, awaiting instructions from the caller. 

Emma and Lily briefly cling to each other as the others glide their way into the fairy ball, 

“What do we need to remember?” Lily says, hushed and rushed. 

“Don’t touch the food- even you- or we’ll have to stay. The trance will probably be harder on me than you. Try to find information through conversation, don’t agree to anything. And above all, don’t lose track of each other or we could end up getting out days or even weeks apart”. 

They stand in each other’s gaze for a moment, and Emma leans forward to kiss her once, before they part and join the party. 

Emma’s never been a huge fan of parties. True, they were fun, but more often than not she found herself sticking to the people she knew and stepping out as early as would be polite. But being in among the fairy ball had the effect on her head of a strong lager. The music was loud enough to be enchanting, near loud enough to drown out thought, the dancers whirling and twirling, around her, and when she joined in, in perfect sync. 

She breaks loose of a Virginia reel, and finds herself near the refreshment table. It’s nearly impossible to pull herself away. The roasts, piles of sea creatures, jellies and desserts, all emit an otherworldly aroma. Only the threat of never leaving, is enough in her vaguely drunken head to force herself to ignore it. 

The other humans they came in with look worse off than her. Rather than under a trance, they seem well and truly hypnotized, barely responding to others. 

Lily is walking on the edge. They were right, it turns out, that because of her fairy heritage, that the spell their magic held over the humans did not affect her. And for the first time since they had left Aurora’s forest, the others were noticing her. 

Strangely enough, they don’t seem to be paying her any mind. 

Two fly by, with the faces of old women, and she hears them mutter about, “Halflings, come crawling back”, that she assumes is aimed at her, but overall, she doesn’t get the sense that this group thinks terribly deeply about things. 

The party is in the forest clearing, and there are lights leading up a hill, where fairies are coming and going. With trepidation, Lily decides to investigate. 

The grass on the hill is thick and dark, and the lights are spaced further apart. The path follows the hill to its low peak, then over it into a shallow hollow. 

In the shallows, sits the Faerie Queen atop her throne, the others attending her. And then Lily realizes, that now they’re all watching her. 

Lily clumsily attempts a curtsy.

“Have you returned to serve your Queen, halfling?”.

Lily doesn’t even get a chance to respond before Titania rises. The fairy is as tall as Lily, but somehow still seems to tower over her, swathed from head to toe in frothy green. 

She raises a finger. 

“Your mother was never pleased with the land of her birthright. Always wanted more. Left and bought and traded magic with common beings. Even when she returned, all she did was blather on about some curse she traded with a human, that somehow seemed to slip from her grasp. So covetous she was, of the magic of a common imp”.

She taps Lily on the forehead, and suddenly she feels dizzy. 

“Such a bore, “ Titania declares, before sending Lily off with a quick twitch of the hand. 

She returns to the dancers in the clearing and finds Emma just as the caller calls out the Black Nag. 

She finds Emma quickly, and takes her hand. Emma looks a bit stupified, but manages, 

“What happened? Did you already find…”

They step and twirl in line, and then separate. 

When they reunite, Lily manages to get out, 

“Something that was traded….she had to find...a spell….something about a human and an imp”. 

The music doesn’t stop, it’s intoxicating. The air is warm and full of the smell of the fairy feast they have to avoid. Emma’s hands are warm and solid in hers, and when they step forward and turns, Lily can feel her breath on her cheeks. And she can suddenly understand how people get stuck here. 

Then she catches sight of the other dancers, seemingly moving at though on a track. Stiff and empty, like clockwork figures. Many are dressed in old fashioned clothing, and appear emaciated. 

Emma laughs, sounding borderline delirious. 

“We have to….” she hiccups, “God you look beautiful in the moonlight….gotta….gotta get out of here.”

Lily takes a deep breathe, and when the line moves them out of sight, she counts the seconds until they clasp hands again, and then with a hint of roughness, pulls Emma out of the arrangement. 

They barely make it into the trees, just within sight of the edge of the ring of mushrooms when one of the fairies lunges in front of them. It’s face is narrow, and young, and when it says, “Leaving so soon” they can see it has fangs. 

It extends its hands, full of fruit. 

“Can’t we offer you a refreshment?”

Emma whispers, still with a giggle. 

“Do not trust goblin men, do not eat their fruit”. 

They turn abruptly, and push to speed up. 

Then Emma trips, and Lily stops to pull her up. 

“Why’s a chest here?” Lily grumbles. 

Then Emma freezes. 

“Wait”. 

Then suddenly there’s a loud crack and a borderline fearsome squeal. 

Emma pants, then grabs her again and they run. 

They break the ring and tumble to the ground, heaving. 

“What was that?” Lily asks. 

Emma stands up and shows her. It’s a heavy chain, with a set of shackles on the end. 

“Iron. Fairies can’t stand it. Touch it, I want to see if it affects you top”. 

Lily reaches out, and is immediately overcome by the feeling of pins and needles in her skin. When she actually touches it, it sends chills through her from head to foot. She jerks back. 

“Good to know” Emma says, tucking the chain into her pack. 

She then slumps to the grass, flat on her back. Lily is suddenly overcome by exhaustion and joins her. 

“It’s warm” Lily comments. It is, and the sky is clear and blue. “How long have we been gone?”

Emma rubs a cheek against the grass, seemingly sunning herself in the warmth. She asks. 

“So what do we know now?” 

“Titania said something about Mom seeking a spell that she had traded and then lost. Something extremely powerful, made by an imp. “

Emma stiffens. 

“What?”

“My mother’s stepmother- the former Queen. When my mother was woken from her spell, she had reappeared and threatened the kingdom with a spell created by Rumpelstiltskin. He said, after helping banish her, that it would have sent the entire land to another world. But he never would tell about where the instruments of the spell, and then he vanished, never seen again.”

Lily thinks, 

“Titania did say that Mom was never satisfied with the world she came from. A spell that would allow her to escape to another one...I don’t know, maybe she would do it. Or she might just be upset that it slipped away from her“

“Another world. God, I can’t even imagine that. What do we ever have on our side?”

“Knowledge, just a little. The fairies enchantments. And those shackles. Mom’s full blooded fairy, those could bring her to her knees.”

“And we have you”, Emma says, sleepily. 

“What?”

“You said that she always wanted you to be your best. Well you have, she might even be happy to see you. “

Lily is left, with her stomach squirming, when she realizes that Emma has fallen asleep.


	11. Chapter 11

The next morning, Emma quickly realizes that they’ve reemerged in Kelt in early spring. 

She tries not to be overly disturbed by the realization. 

They walk quietly hand in hand through the forest towards the sea, Emma’s heart heavy, even in the sunshine. A year. She’s been away from home for nearly a year. It’s been that long since she’s seen her mom and dad. God- they’ve never even met Lily. How on earth were they going to explain all this?

The disillusionment has dropped again, Emma reasons it will probably come back when they’re back on the cursed land. So they stay at an actual inn the last day. 

 

In late afternoon, just as the sun has started to ease down the sky, they sit on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea. They can still see the edge, the gray clouds peeking over the water, swallowing up the sun. 

“If your grandmother had a spell she’d hidden from everyone, can you think of where it would be?” Lily asks. 

“Step-grandmother,” Emma corrects, “I never knew either of my real ones. And my only real guess would be in or around the winter palace. Mom and Dad never liked it there, and it’s out the way so we don’t really use it. Plus there’s a lot of political baggage, that was where the Queen spent most of her reign. Lots of people in that region still harbour a lot of resentment.”

“I guess that’s where we’ll have to start looking then”. 

They sit there for a while, in comfortable silence. 

“Another world. God, I can’t even imagine that. A year ago I had barely left the kingdom.” 

“A year ago, I had barely left Mom’s fortress” Lily replies, “But it does seem strange. Despite what Titania said about Mom never being satisfied with where she came from, I never really took for for a conquerer.”

Emma shrugs, “I guess there’s a limit to how much you can understand about people. I mean, we found where she’s from, but we still don’t know where you came from.”

Lily’s quiet after that, and Emma fears she’s touched a nerve.

“Have you ever thought about that? Trying to find your dad, where that half of you came from?”

That gets a smile, even if a small one. 

“I guess that’s something to think about when this is all over.”

It’s strange, at this point thinking of this whole thing ending is foreign. Emma feels like she’s a completely different person than she was before, and can’t even imagine going back to their normal life. 

They cross the sea back into the spell the next day. 

The winter palace is a nearly straight path west from Camelot, and a much quicker journey than the one they took from Aurora’s kingdom. It still threatens to take over a month. 

The damage that the spell is wreaking on the land is more visible now. Vines stretching and breaking windows, wear and tear on roads. It makes Emma angry, angrier than she can remember being. Who does Maleficent think she is, to do this to people who are unlikely even know who she is?

And every once in a while, they pass a village or town, and find it tossed, torn asunder, like the capitol of Camelot, in almost a path of destruction. 

And now and then, they hear Diablo’s caw, or the chittering whisper of Maleficent’s other minions.

When they cross the border back into Emma’s kingdom, she notices Lily getting listless and twitchy, and easily tired. With enough nagging and prodding, she finally admits that not being able to transform is apparently taking a physical toll. 

It’s a bridge they’ll have to cross when they come to they both reason. 

Until one day, after crossing over a small bridge into a clearing in a forest, the spell suddenly breaks. 

Emma is so struck by the sudden feeling of the sun on her face, she falls to her knees. Unlike Kelt, it is wholly unexpected. 

Lily beside her, twitches again, and then says. 

“If the spell can’t touch here-”

“Do it. Right now what’s the worst that could happen?”

Five seconds later, the black and purple figure of Lily’s dragon form rises above her and takes off into the clouds. 

Emma smiles. It’s been bothering her, her companion being so uncomfortable all the time and there being nothing she could do about it. Then she takes stock of where they are. 

The clearing is reasonably large, but the only figure in the area is a small cottage. No people, no ruins, no other signs of why the area is resistant to Maleficent’s spell. 

She steps up to the cobblestones outside the cottage and raises and knocks the wooden knocker. 

When no one answers, she tries the door, and to her relief, it creaks open. 

The interior is open and fairly plain, with a table next to the kitchen fire. The only thing out of the ordinary is the large number of books in a case along the other side and the workbench covered in tools. Tools that Emma immediately notices, are vibrating. She decides it would be prudent not to touch them. 

She digs through the drawers and finds the ingredients to cook up a simple potato soup. While it’s cooking, she decides to browse the books. 

Emma was never particularly studious, but as soon as she picks up the first book, she starts pourling through them. She sits on the cobblestones, soaking up the sunshine while Lily still swoops and soars and the soup simmers inside. 

When Lily finally lands, and transforms back, breathing hard, sweating and looking still rarely happy. 

“Good?” Emma asks. 

“Very”. 

“What’s the sky like?”

“Whatever this is, it’s less than a mile. Straight up is clear, but we’re still surrounded on all sides.”

She sits down next to Emma on the cobblestones, and sticks her head over her shoulder. 

“What’cha reading?”

“I think this cottage belonged to a sorcerer. A powerful one. He would have to be, if Maleficent’s spell can’t touch it, even when he’s not here. He’s got tons of magic tools, and books about everything. 

Emma just points the page at her. The drawing is of a dragon, large, and mostly green, with what appears to be a kind of fur instead of all scales. 

“The few stories surrounding the rare non-solo dragons hail from the far north beyond the faraway mountains. Stories of these beasts differ from the familiar breeds in their communal life style, comparative friendliness, and a few stories of shapeshifting abilities and interbreeding with other beings. “

“Do...do you think maybe?” Lily asks, eyes shining. 

“Have you ever heard anything like it, even close? You had to come from somewhere”. 

Lily reaches over to pull the book closed and set it aside. She then puts both her hands on Emma’s shoulders and kisses her fiercely. 

“Oh.” Emma says, during a breath, “I made dinner, it’ll get cold,” before she’s again preoccupied. 

“Dinner can wait” Lily says, eyes heavily lidded and voice soft. “Let this bubble be ours for a while”. 

“Okay” Emma replies, feeling breathless, blood rushing through her skin. 

Their noses bump when they resume kissing.

It is a lovely day, and the sunshine feels amazing on Emma’s skin. In the later years, that will be her strongest memory of that day will be the sun on her bare skin, the soft grass on her back and the weight of Lily on top of her. It would be easy to say the world changed, but truthfully it just feels like a dream. 

Neither of them are aware of the rest of the world until the moon rises. When they both come down, breathing hard, Emma sits up. She nudges Lily and laughs. 

“You have twigs in your hair”. 

Lily reaches back to touch her head, embarrassed. 

Emma reaches out and touches her wrist. 

“I’ve never noticed that before” she says, gently tracing an imprint on Lily’s wrist that vaguely looks like a star. “Is it a scar or a birthmark?”

“Birthmark I guess, I’ve always had it. Though I guess maybe it could be a dragon thing.”

“You could always try and find out.” Emma says. 

“You talking about the book?”

“It says go north. There’s not much in the far north, but if these stories have traveled, they must have some truth. I could go with you. When all of this spell business is done.” 

“Done” Lily says, staring off into the sky. “Do you really think we can do it, we can fix this?”

“I know so, I promise” Emma says firmly. She reaches and pulls a lock of Lily’s hair back, and presses her lips softly over the sensitive spot behind her ear, making her shiver. 

“Come on,”, she says, standing up, and gathering her clothes off the ground. “That promise is true, but we’ll have to keep moving. Get rid of this spell, and then move on with our lives.”

Lily stays on the ground for a few more seconds. Even in the moonlight, Emma seems to brighten the world around her like the sun.


	12. Chapter 12

The winter palace is as cold and foreboding as Emma remembers. It’s easy enough to find, you can see it for miles, in all it’s tall, pointed glory. 

“Who...who designed that place?” Lily asks, mystified. 

Emma shakes her head. 

The walk to the grounds is somber. The devastation throughout the land has become more and more extreme the closer they get. 

“She’s getting frustrated, “ Lily says, “It shouldn’t have taken her this long for her to find the spell.”. 

They’re straight across the courtyard, when they see her. She’s dressed all in purple, and the aura of magic around her hands. 

Lily freezes. 

“Are you ok?” Emma whispers to her, squeezing her hand. 

Lily swallows. 

“Let’s go”. 

The front door is open, so they don’t even have to sneak. Everything in the foyer is overturned. 

Maleficent is searching the room right atop the great staircase. She’s yammering about something, but neither of them can hear what about. They walk past, with Emma take a cursory glance, and Lily pointedly doesn’t look at all. 

“Can you think of where it would be that she wouldn’t have looked?”

Emma pauses, looking thoughtful. 

“Mom said before this all went down, when she was still young, that the Queen used to spend all of her time in the basements. They used to be dungeons, so she never willingly went down there, but there’s a lot of little areas down there.”

If the outside of the palace was imposing, the subterranean areas are worse. Dark, leaking from the rain, full of more iron than could be practical. They do appear to have been tossed like the rest of the palace, but not super thoroughly. 

In one of the rooms, which only holds a table, Emma notices something on the floor. 

“That’s strange” she says, running her boot along the cobblestones. 

The line between the stones continues around the room, and ends with one unusually square stone. When Emma steps heavily on it, the floor gives way to a deep, stone staircase. 

“No one knew this was here?” Lily asks. 

“Like I said, we didn’t spend much time here,” Emma replies grimly. “I guess we should go through it a little more thoroughly”. 

The area under the stairs is barely bigger than a shed. There are drawers on practically every surface, some torn open, some still shut. The walls are also all lined with drawers, in the same state. It’s not impressive really, it would look to anyone else like a workshop, albeit one with more metal than wood. 

Emma looks aside at Lily. 

“You start on the left, I’ll start on the right.”

The drawer Emma starts with is just full of tools- blank scrolls and quills and a container of the blackest ink. The next one is full of nothing but dust and curls of cut parchment. 

Lily starts on the drawers on the outside of the wall. She opens one and immediately yelps. 

“What?”

“Looks like a human heart. Ugh, I don’t even want to know.”

She continues opening them gingerly. 

Emma opens another drawer and groans. 

“Find something?”

“A lot of somethings”. 

This drawer is full of vials and rolled up scrolls. 

“Help me read them all”. 

Her step grandmother’s writing, thankfully, is neat. 

When Emma finally finds the scroll, it’s not at all conspicuous. It’s bound like the others, and neatly labeled, nothing to indicate it was worth cursing the entire land over. 

“The Dark Curse- for use to trap enemies in a land without magic and separate them from their happiness”. 

“Wow” Lily says, mouth agape. “She’s specific, I’ll give her that.”

“Makes me wonder about the imp that supposedly made it. That’s a pretty pointed use. What purpose could he have had for it?”

“I guess we’ll never know”. 

There’s silence for a moment, as Emma muses. 

“So we found what she’s looking for...what do we do now?”

“Let’s camp for the night and try to work it out.” 

They set up the cover and bedrolls just over the hill from the palace. They pass Maleficent again, this time going through the library. Emma cringes inside. Her mother was very proud of their collection, and would be upset by the damage. Lily continues on the whole way out without giving her mother a single spare glance. 

Their dinner is a crust of dry bread and some berries.

Emma risks lighting a small fire, which she uses to engulf the scroll in flames until it’s dust, then extinguishes it. 

When it’s done, Emma lets out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding.

“I feel a lot better now that that doesn’t exist anymore”.

“What are we going to do about the sleeping spell?”

“Would that have a scroll too?”

Lily chews her lip in contemplation. 

“Mom has a thing for spinning wheels and spindles...but I have no idea where she would have seeded this curse. “

“We might have to go back to the old fashioned method”. 

Lily cocks an eyebrow at Emma. 

“True love’s kiss?”

“Doesn’t have to be romantic love. I truly love both my parents, and my brother.”

“Must be nice. “ Lily’s turned so she’s not looking at her. Emma tries to open her mouth to reply, but Lily doesn’t let her, “And like I told Flora, I’m not sure this is the kind of spell could be broken like that.”

“Well we have to try” Emma says, fiercely. “And anyway, that’s the part of the land that the curse started, so if it’s seeded or attached to an object, it should at least be in that area.”

“And what are we going to do with Mom?” Lily asks. 

Emma’s quiet for a while. She’s thinking. She’s been thinking of a plan for a while now, but isn’t sure how to put it. 

“The smith in the village by the summer palace- he’s the best in the land. Everyone comes to him. If there’s enough iron anywhere in the kingdom to bind your mother and make her harmless, he would have it. “

Emma takes a deep breath before saying the next part. 

“I think tomorrow you should transform, go over the hill and find your mom. Convince her that I told you that the scroll is probably hidden in the summer palace. I’ll stay disillusioned, and when you we get back, I’ll find the iron tools, and try to break the item seeding the curse or make an attempt at true love’s kiss. All you have to do is keep her occupied long enough that she won’t notice what I’m doing.”

Lily’s head is ducked, pressed tightly into her chest, and she lets out a tiny sob. She’s practically shaking. 

“Are you...scared to talk to her again?” Emma asks with disbelief. 

Lily lifts her face, but her mouth stays squeezed shut and just shakes her head. 

“I don’t know, I don’t know anymore,” she finally squeaks out. “The last time I spoke to her I was so ashamed, I was convinced nothing I could do would ever please her. She used to make me feel so small...I don’t know how I’m going to react when she speaks to me”. 

“Hey, hey” Emma says, gently resting her hands on each side of Lily’s face. “She’s your mother, but she doesn’t own you. You’re your own person. This past year proves it. Nothing she can say to you will change that.”

Lily laughs, and rests her head in the crook of Emma’s neck. 

“And you have all night to gather your confidence.”

That seems to calm her a bit, and soon the breathing against Emma’s neck feels less ragged. Lily lifts both her arms up, wrapped them around Emma’s shoulders and squeezing. 

“If we have tonight,” she says, quietly, “Can you help me stop thinking so much?”

Emma kisses her softly. That’s answer enough for her. 

It’s not like the night at the magician’s cottage. Quieter, more intense. Every once and a while, Lily feels a wave of uncertainty, inadequacy threaten to overtake her, only to be chased away by Emma’s touch. Emma can’t seem to hold onto her tightly enough, because as confident as she’d been earlier, she would be lying to admit she had no fears. 

They fall asleep together, but the morning still comes too soon. 

When the light returns, squeezing through the clouds, they pack up camp quietly. Today, Emma takes both packs. 

“I hope this plan of yours works” Lily says, loosening her laces before preparing to transform. 

“I’d never call myself a strategist”, Emma admits, “But it’s the best plan we’ve got.”

Ready, they embrace one last time. 

Emma whispers a near silent, “I love you. Don’t forget that.” 

She hadn’t truly expected a response, but the shift when Lily immediately transforms. She quickly climbs on her back, clinging to one of the narrower spots on her neck, and they take off.


	13. Chapter 13

The flight back to the summer palace is strange. 

Being so close, Emma can see for sure the resemblance between the two. The tapestry had not been wrong- Maleficent was huge, and frightening. Their color schemes were the same, both with the same long neck and pointed ears. Lily is tiny flying next to her. 

They fly for the most part in silence. When she’d approached Maleficent at the winter palace, Lily had been curt, clipped in tone. To an outsider, it might have seemed uninterested. Emma recognizes it as a way for Lily to keep her distance.

It turned out all she had to say was “I think I know where what you’re looking for is” to get her attention. 

When they reach the edge of the village, Emma slips up Lily’s neck carefully, and whispers in her ear, before sliding back down and off onto the ground. The two dragons transform back into their human forms. 

A solid stare. 

“A fairy disillusionment. Clever girl. I hope whatever you traded for it wasn’t too valuable”.

Direct interaction with her would break it, Merryweather had warned. Emma is careful not to risk it as she turns to leave the castle and head for the village. 

And just like that, Lily is alone with her mother. 

Emma’s suggestion had been, to stall her, to tell Maleficent that the spell would likely be hidden somewhere in the summer palace. 

So she does. 

“The princess didn’t give you anymore information than that?”

“Well she barely knew what I was talking about. Her family wasn’t exactly close to the previous guard.”

“Good enough I supposed,” Maleficent reasons, pulling open the first wardrobe in one of the front rooms. She’s a speedy searcher, and with Lily trailing alongside her, she hopes so hard that Emma’s a fast runner.   
Emma, is in fact, running as fast as her legs will carry her. The village is an easy walk, but she wants to waste no time at all. 

The path looks sad now, covered in vines. The artistic stonework is no longer visible. The farmer’s houses along the way hardly recognizable. 

The village itself too, nearly makes her sob. The stage in the center courtyard, where Pinocchio and his traveling show had performed nearly every year, had collapsed under the weight of the vines. 

Emma passes the courtyard and the tannery and the church before making her way to the blacksmith’s shop. He’d fallen asleep near his forge. 

Thankfully, his collection of chains and shackles is extensive. He wasn’t known as one of the greatest ironworkers in the land for nothing. 

Emma selects the heaviest ones she can carry. She remembers the effect that the simple one had had on Titania’s subjects. She can’t continue on the path as fast as she could before, dragging them behind her, but she’s soldiered on. It occurs to her for the first time since this whole thing has started, that most of her clothes are unlikely to fit her anymore. Her and Lily have been walking so much and eating so little, and the clothing the fairies had given them were magic...she suddenly foresees a million more dress fittings in her future. 

Huffing and puffing, she finally gets back to the palace. The weight begins to get to her, she pants and sweats her way across the grass outside. She prays that Lily and Maleficent aren’t too close to being done, that she still has time. 

They have, in fact, sacked most of the first floor. 

“What even is this spell that you want so bad?”

“I should ask you daughter, how you were so sure that that’s what I was searching for.”

The lie they’d come up with spills from Lily’s lips with almost disturbing ease.

“I told the princess that you were a collector of magic. She’d heard tell of the spell her grandmother had prepared, and said she would tell me where it might be if I got her outside the spread of your curse”. 

“Saving her own skin. Sounds about like a royal to me.”

Lily forces herself to swallow the bile rising in her throat at the slight. 

“You didn’t answer me”. 

Maleficent sighs. 

“This world doesn’t deserve us Lily. All the time spent traveling it and learning its ways, and it still has no place for us. It’s time we found another one, take the time to start over.”

Lily’s skin prickles. First with a sort of tenderness, that despite all of her lambasting her throughout childhood that Maleficent genuinely wanted to start over with her. Then with indignation. No place for them. Had she ever even truly tried to fit in anywhere?

“And what would you do for the world where we ended up?”

Maleficent shrugs carelessly as she throws open another cabinet. 

“The imp had said it would lead to a world no magic. Sounds like one which would be easy to mesmerize, ones that might pay proper respect to someone who had fought so hard to gain magical talent.”

Lily bristles again. 

“So this is really all just another attempt for you to rule over people.”

“I’ve spent my whole life grasping and fighting for any bit of knowledge. Anything I could learn I did. And everywhere I went, people told me to stop. Told me that what I was doing was against the rules or just not done. But I still persevered, I pushed past every challenge, everyone who tried to stand in my way, who told me I couldn’t do something. Do I not have a right to the power I earned?”

After a long pause, Lily asks. 

“The day you kicked me out, you knew you were going to do this? I could have gotten cursed myself! You didn’t know where I was going to go after I left”

“Oh Lily, this plan has been a long time coming. Grudges are not to be forgotten, but to be honed. Besides, if I had ever truly needed to check up on you, I had my ways. I hoped I had taught you well enough that you might have avoided being affected, but it was a risk I had to take”. 

And just like that, everything fits together in Lily’s mind. Her mother had raised her, cared for her, loved her even, but ultimately she still saw her as an extension of herself. Suddenly, it feels as though a weight has been lifted from her shoulders. 

Lily had spent so much of her childhood seeking her mother’s approval. And in this moment, she begins to feel like she’s beyond needing it. She’s a different woman than the Lily who left the Forbidden Fortress more than a year ago. 

“Follow me,” she says a bit stiffly, “The princess said they had a bunch of stuff in the dungeons. It could definitely be down there. ”

The princess as it was, had stashed the iron chains and was running throughout her childhood home as fast as her feet could carry her, trying her best to identify anything which could possibly be the seed of the spell. 

Every single room, nothing nothing at all. Vines have broken through some of the walls, dust and debris gathering on the floors, it having been so many months since they’d seen the push of the servant’s brooms and mops. 

Her own room seems foreign to Emma. She rushes past it, there’s no signs of any sort of magical presence to her there. It’s the same everywhere else- the parlors, the grand dining room, the foyer. Everything is solidly, ordinarily, still. Even in the storerooms, the servant’s quarters, areas of the castle that Emma has rarely set foot.

She ascends the last staircase two at a time. Fleeting memories enter her mind of being scolded for doing so, and feeling ashamed when she followed these scoldings by falling. 

Dad is in his study, looking over treaties and papers. Several advisors are with him, no doubt seeking some diplomatic way out of the predicament even as Maleficent’s curse swept the grounds. 

Mom was in the nursery just off her and Dad’s bedchamber. She sits in slumber by the cribside of her one child who was still at home. 

Tears prickle at Emma’s eyes as she hears Lily and Maleficent tearing through the floors below. She’s searched the castle top to bottom and still has no idea where the spell is being grown from. She stares at the baby in the tiny wooden crib. She’d resented him a bit, for taking her parents time and attention. She’d then been grateful, feeling like she failed as ruler, they’d always have him to fall back on. He was sleeping as peacefully as he had been when she’d last left the castle. 

Fashioning a carrier out of a bag she finds in a drawer, Emma picks up her brother and carries him on her chest. 

“Mom or Dad would probably make for a better story down the line, kid, but you’re way more portable.”

She then creeps down stairs, to gather the chains she’d brought. 

When she gets to the bottom floor, Lily is leading Maleficent down into one of the cellar dungeons. 

Yes, Emma squeals quietly to herself. This is the one with the cell where they had kept Rumpelstiltskin. She had told Lily that before, that it was the best place, only one way in and out, the tunnel ended in the woods. She remembered. 

The door at the bottom of the narrow stairs was locked, so when the group pauses, Maleficent transforms and forces it open with her claws. 

Emma is hanging at the doorway, trying to plan. The two largest shackles should work well, but she has to be careful to get close enough without being noticed. Lily and Maleficent are standing, near stark still, in front of the wooden bars. 

“This must be where they kept the imp who pushed and traded and manipulated everyone to make the curse. “

“He must be famous if even you’ve heard of him”. 

“The Dark One is an enigma. He has had his hands all over the land, but so little is known truly of him”. 

Emma catches Lily’s eye, and steps closer behind Maleficent, and silently as she ever has. One shackle is held open in one hand, ready to be snapped shut, but the other dangles. 

“Wasn’t there a story?” Lily asks, gaze, leading away from where Emma is. “That a fairy once offered him a chance, to escape with his son, somewhere, but he refused it and his son disappeared?”

Emma is briefly frozen. That story had been told by Flora to them before they left the cottage in the woods, as an example of the type of magic that they had dealt with. 

Maleficent seems to be listening, so hard in fact that there’s no sign at all that she feels the first shackle wrap around her ankle. 

“I must say I admire a man who could take matters into his own hands.”

With more care and precision than she’s ever given to anything before, Emma snaps the second shackle, and then throws the remaining of the chain over Maleficent’s shoulder. 

The change is instantaneous. The noise that comes out of Maleficent’s throat is guttural, inhuman. She falls to the ground. 

Lily steps forward and locks the other end of the chains around her hands. 

“What have you done to me,” Maleficent’s voice is raspy. 

“The tunnel here leads out into the woods?” Lily asks, not even glancing at her mother. 

Emma nods. 

“Help me get her out?”

Emma walks in front, leading the loose end of the chain, while Lily half drags, half cajoles the fallen, incomprehensible Maleficent. 

They reach the mouth of the tunnel in just a few minutes. The trees are fairly thin, and the gray sky a welcome brightness. Maleficent has mostly quit moving, and the look on her face is next to impossible to read. 

“No luck finding the seed?” Lily asks. 

Emma nods again. 

The two stare at each other for a moment. 

“What are you going to do with her now?” Emma asks. Her stomach is turning over again and again. This is real now, this is all going to end. 

Lily sighs. 

“I’m going to take her back to Titania. She’s not the most stable sort, but it will give the opportunity to figure things out. I doubt she can kill her, but at least she shouldn’t be able to do anymore damage.“

“Are you- are you okay now?”

Lily smiles, genuinely. 

“All it took was kidnapping a princess, being blessed by a fairy, and a year’s worth of adventure and falling in love for me to come to the terms with the fact that I don’t need my mother’s approval to be who I am.”

The two lean in and kiss so desperately that if either of them had a touch of magic upon their heads it would be barely a memory. 

“Wait” Emma says, as they pull apart. “Don’t leave, wait until I try and break the curse. I want the whole kingdom to see- I want everyone to know what you did.”

Lily waits. 

Emma leans down and plunks a soft kiss on her younger brother’s forehead. 

And just like that, a wave of light flows throughout the land. 

The gray sky turns to summer blue. The vines rescind and vanish, the dust and dirt and debris that have gathered upon the land is miraculously gone. The sound returns, the birds and animals and the distant hum of people waking up. 

“Won’t make for as good a story,” Emma comments, out of breath. 

“It won’t be written by us anyway.” Lily returns. 

Emma and Lily stand, staring for another moment. 

“You’ll come back right? After you deal with her?”

The words “I promise” come out of Lily’s throat, deep and husky. Turning and leaving Emma is the hardest thing she’s ever had to do. 

She transforms on the forest floor. She lifts Maleficent into her claws and spreads her wings. 

“Sorry Mom,” she says, “You’ve done a lot for me, but I couldn’t let you hurt people anymore, not for me or anything else.”

She takes off into the sky. 

Emma stands and stares until long after she has disappeared. She stays until she feels her brother stir in his carrier. She bounces him softly. 

“It’s been a long time kid. Hope you had a good nap. I had a great adventure. I’ll tell you all about it”. 

The turns and starts on the path to face the music.


End file.
